Talat and Isabelle Othman Lecture with Rashid Khalidi

Rashid Khalidi will discuss The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.

Presented in partnership with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago

Virtual event

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About the book: In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

About the author: Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He was President of the Middle East Studies Asociation and is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. Khalidi is author of eight books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020), and Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (rev. ed. 2010), and has co-edited three other books and published over 110 academic articles. He has written op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other newspapers, and has appeared widely on TV and radio in the US and abroad.